Weak Form Christianity

I just had the most liberating conversation with a Christian I've had in a very long time.

Almost all the Christians I know have been Christians their whole lives.  I just had coffee with a friend who didn't become a Christian until her freshman year of college.  One of my favorite things about her is that she doesn't speak Christianese- she just talks about things the way they are.

She has what appears to me (and probably most career Christians) an odd faith.  I'm labeling it Weak Form Christianity (WFC), not because it is inferior, but rather in the same way we talk about Weak Form Efficiency.

To summarize my understanding of the belief, it goes something like this: It is self evident that we are moral agents with free will.  As such, there must be something more than the physical.  This world and everything in it- emotional, intellectual, and relational- points towards a God as that something more.  Moreover, it points toward a relational God, a God who values love, who values self-sacrifice, who values altruism.  The Christian God is unique among all the forms of supernatural that have been proposed by humanity.  In particular, it is the only religion that offers us both an explanation and a narrative for the value of love, self-sacrifice and altruism.  It is the only religion that says that we simply cannot earn, fight, claw, scratch, or otherwise find our way to God.  Instead, it speaks of God coming to us in the ultimate act of love and sacrifice through the life, death, and resurrection of his son, Jesus Christ. 

But the difference between WFC and traditional Christianity is that this is pretty much all WFC claims. It doesn't claim any knowledge of whether people from other religions can make the cut.  It makes no claims about the infallibility of the Bible.  It makes no claims about what sort of relationship you're supposed to have with God.  All these are left as exercises for the reader, as it were.  (I want to point out that WFC is distinct from the "lukewarm" Christianity that is fairly common in America today.  WFC can be held with great conviction, and believers can live a life wholly commited to God even without claiming definitive knowledge of the specifics of God)

Essentially, this is an argument that Christianity is true because it just sounds true. It meets our (admittedly western) expectations of what a God would/could/should look like given the moral intuitions and subjective experiences we have in this world. And it gives us a model on which to base our actions and attitudes- a way to live our lives that has meaning and purpose (and is not self-contradictory).

To be fair, WFC is not a particularly well developed world view.  It doesn't explain a lot of things, and it is perfectly comfortable ignoring the problems created by the Biblical doctrines of Christianity.  But then again, it sort of just works.  And let me be clear, I'm not sure if it's true, but I do think it works.  I've seen it work, both in myself and in the lives of others.  It makes you a "better" person.  It makes you a loving person, a generous person, a person less concerned about yourself and more concerned about fixing this world that we've broken so badly.

Oddly enough, I find WFC much more compelling than traditional Christianity.  The more I study, the more convinced I become that we simply can't know the specifics of God with any sort of certainty.  Is baptism necessary for salvation?  Transubstantiation or Consubstantiation?  Is Homosexuality a sin or rejected because of a cultural construct in the time of the Bible?  I don't know.  An honest Christian can't claim to know either (though they could claim a belief or educated guess).  But many versions of Christianity promote these to the role of core doctrines- if not contingencies of salvation, at least contingencies of a "proper" Christian belief.  With so many separate-but-equally-supported belief systems (some internal to Christianity, some external), I find myself rejecting the idea that it would be possible to arrive at the correct conclusion even if one of them really is true.  And WFC does not suffer from this criticism.

I think the real attraction of WFC, however, is that it gives us a basis for living a better life, while leaving open the possibility that we have no idea what we're doing.  It's an acknowledgment only of the things that seem intuitively obvious, and an extrapolation of those things into a religious ideology.  It doesn't make nearly so many unverifiable claims as other forms of the religion.

There are obvious problems with WFC, however (lest the reader think me a convert).  Picking the parts you like and rejecting the parts you don't is almost never a good idea (whether its in a religion, a person, or anything else).  While WFC does not suffer from as many unverifiable claims as the rest, is does suffer from a few.  It makes some pretty big assumptions, going from "Moral Law" to "Omnipotent Benevolent Personal Relational Deity" without blinking.  It makes even fewer substantive claims than traditional Christianity- if Christianity is unfalsifiable, WFC is even more so.  But I think the biggest argument against WFC is that it's pretty clearly incomplete.  Nobody really believes this vague generalist view of God.

Interestingly, WFC seems to be the doctrine most Christians turn too when cornered by any of the (seemingly insurmountable) problems with the religion.  They invoke the "God works in mysterious ways" argument (one of my least favorite things in the world), and then say "But that's not the point of Christianity.  Christianity is about...", and they go on to expound WFC.  But very few Christians actually admit to believing only WFC.  They still hold to these ancillary claims and traditions that seem to have no basis, particularly if WFC is the only thing that really matters.

I honestly suspect this is an issue of ignorance within the church.  I have yet to talk to a Christian who has seriously considered in their own life all the arguments I have against the infalliability of the Bible, or the problem of Geography, or the basis on which Muslims should deconvert.  No one has given me even close to a satisfactory answer on any of them, and when confronted with these arguments, they retreat to WFC- but they never actually deal with the issues at hand.  And this seems to me a damning piece of evidence.  It seems to me that the Christians I know (even the ones I respect) live in a state of cognitive dissonance- they haven't really followed the conclusions of their religion to the logical end.  To be fair, I hadn't either.  When I did, I rejected my formulation of Christianity. 

Let me pause here and say that I don't legitimately think I'm living without cognitive dissonance.  I think it's something everybody deals with, as nobody has come up with a seriously liveable world view that does not contain at least a few contradictions and idiosyncracies.  That said, we ought (and here I go irrationally prescribing things again) to examine ourselves for this bias at every turn.  We should NOT be ignoring contradictions in our belief system; rather, we should admit them and attempt to rectify them with reality.  And it frustrates me when Christians don't do this, and instead rely on the boogeyman of epistemlogical debates- "We can't understand God"